The Contract Is On: Hitman – Absolution

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My relationship with Hitman and his latest subtitle is one of love at fifth sight. It hasn’t been a whirlwind romance, instead starting with something more like a few gentle but malodorous gusts of disappointment, but now I think we’re just about ready to snuggle again. The Contracts mode, with its freeform hits, could have been designed to twang at my heartstrings and with David Bateson’s back on vocal duties whispering sinister somethings into my ear, I’m ready to be impressed. I wrote about Contracts in a hotel room, eschewing offers of German beer in favour of typing excitedly about simulated murders. Here’s an eighteen minute video very similar to what was shown at Gamescom.

Hitman: Absolution is out November 20th. There are an intimidating number of very interesting games happening soon.

Between Hitman, Dishonored and AssCreed, there is going to be a lot of assassinating this christmas.
The first two are preordered, the third one still has yet to convince me. I wish they would give us a story video with 47 speaking though.

I have the first preordered, sorely tempted by the second, zero interest in the third. I loved Blood Money, installed that again a month ago after having great fun with Sniper Challenge, looking forward to piloting baldilocks through more gloriously satisfying murder. I think AssCreed lost my interest somewhere around the thirtieth instalment of AssCreed 2. That and my impression of AssCreed 3 is that it’ll be a massive jingoistic American patriotism-wank that doesn’t actually offer anything new in gameplay.

the game is made by a Canadian company. the US is like our Drunk Uncle. but i can defs say Canadians hate american redneck patriotism just as much as the rest of the world. so im pretty sure the whole thing will be done in a quite respectable manner.

Really? Despite previous AssCreed games suggesting Benjamin Franklin was a Templar(=bad guy), the adverts for AC3 have been all British = evil and colonies = future land of the free. Being Canadian doesn’t mean the devs are going to be any more balanced because the French sided with the fledgling US and really won the war for them before making a good home in Quebec.

The saving grace is that marketing might not have a clue what they are doing, which has been the case for almost every large publisher for the last four years or so.

Indeed, I’m not saying AssCreed 3 will be like that, but all marketing so far has given precisely that impression. And given that the game’s primary market will be America, it’s not an unreasonable assumption that the game will buy strongly into all that pseudo-religious patriotism crap, because that’ll sell to the ‘stupid American’ demographic. Selling to stupid people is always profitable, they are legion after all.

This game’s definitely on my must-play list. Even if they screwed up with the silly sexualized-nuns-with-guns trailer, the rest of the gameplay footage shown looks very promising in terms of stealth and versatile approaches.

It’s looking pretty darn good overall. That’s a heck of a lot of hovering context button icons but I guess I’ll get used to it. Looks like I’m going to be eschewing the good ol’ mouse and keyboard in favour of my Xbox controller, though. Not that it particularly matters of course.

Bateson’s back? Part of my problem with the game was that it seemed like they were ejecting everything that made the previous games good, including the voice actor of this iconic character. If they just show a few more open sandboxy assassinations (rather than the mostly linear ones they’ve shown,) and get Jesper Kyd back, this would be a guaranteed preorder.

Huh. Looks nice, but…
In order to create a contract you have to play though the level and everything you do and don’t do in the level amounts to a “perfect” playthrough, and any deviation results in a loss of score. Call me a grump, but shouldn’t Hitman be about freedom? The execution of a “perfect” contract then boils down to speed, not creativity, and Hitman’s all about creativity, imho.
It just doesn’t fit, somehow.